The present invention relates to an automatic refueling apparatus for a nuclear power plant, especially to an automatic refueling apparatus suitable for transferring a fuel assembly at high speed.
An existing refueling apparatus is manually operated from an operation box provided on a carriage of the refueling apparatus, and a travel motion and a traverse motion are separately carried out.
Further, AEG company in Germany has developed an automatic system for the refueling of a nuclear reactor. However, this is only partially automatic, the operation being dictated by automatic control commands sent from an operator console on a carriage. Further, simultaneous control of travel and traverse motions has not been realized.
Furthermore, in JP-A-19238/1983, there is disclosed a travel and traverse motion simultaneous control system for a refueling in which a carriage moving route from a present position to a target position is automatically calculated for a complicated travel route, and the limits of the traverse region, and speed control commands for travel and traverse motions are obtained and issued. However, in this control system, only the simultaneous control of travel and traverse motions is aimed at, and a more multidimensional simultaneous control, which may reduce the time for refueling, is not considered or provided.
As mentioned above, in the existing techniques, reducing the time for transferring a fuel assembly between a fuel pool and a reactor core is realized by adopting only simultaneous control of travel and traverse motions in two dimensions, and so a multidimensional control taking elevation and rotation of a fuel assembly grappling apparatus into consideration, that is, a X-Y-Z-.theta. axis simultaneous control, has not been devised for reducing the time of refueling.